Philadelphia Sketch Club

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

Founded in 1882 by Eliza S. Turner, the New Century Guild became one of the oldest and largest organizations devoted to improving the lives of women in the paid workforce. As more women entered offices, shops, and factories in the industrializing city, the Guild offered education, classes, and mutual support. It moved through several Philadelphia addresses before settling at this location in 1906.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2010

Founded in 1824 by prominent Philadelphians, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania is among the oldest institutions of its kind in the nation and has occupied this site since 1884. Its special collections hold many of the country's foundational documents, chronicling American life from the seventeenth century onward. The Society emerged in the Early Republic's surge of civic and antiquarian energy, as a young nation set out to preserve its own record.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

In 1854, free Black Philadelphians founded this literary and educational society in a city that was a hub of antebellum African-American intellectual life. Named for Benjamin Banneker—the self-taught astronomer, almanac author, and surveyor of the new federal capital—the institute embodied the belief that learning was a form of liberation. In an era when most Black Americans were still enslaved, its members cultivated debate, study, and self-improvement as acts of dignity and resistance.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

Louis I. Kahn ranks among the most influential architects of the postwar era, a designer who treated mass, light, and structure as the very substance of his buildings. Trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition at the University of Pennsylvania, he later taught there and ran his practice from this location, producing monumental works admired around the world. His buildings are known for their weighty, almost ancient presence married to a modern sense of purpose.